The open source alternative to my sponsor – Jellyfin vs Plex

– My relationship with Plex has been Rocky. It feels like they’ve changed. Hey, can I watch a movie? When I signed up for a lifetime license, our future looked so bright, But what happened? I’ve been a loyal Plex user basically since I found out that Air Video didn’t have an Android client, and for the most part, it’s been great. Well, at least it’s worked, mostly. (horn toots) The truth is that increasingly I’ve been feeling like Plex’s lost its way. I don’t want games or live TV

Or yet another bloody movie rental service. I want a management tool that organizes and streams my media library to my devices. And while it does still do that, mostly. (horn toots) The community feedback on our recent sponsored video was the little push that I needed to finally check out the big competitor.

Even internally around here, Jellyfin, which is a free and open source media management tool, has received a lot of praise, but like any open source project, you can count on three things, some really good ideas and functionality that commercial products would do well to copy,

A rabid fan base that will turn any discussion of the paid alternative into an excuse to talk about it, and some quirks that you’d have to have a blind spot the size of Jupiter to miss. With that in mind, then let’s go swimming with the jellies

And see what I’ve been missing out on. And see our sponsor, Zoho Desk. Over a hundred thousand businesses worldwide trust Zoho’s context-aware help desk to improve productivity and ensure their customers are kept happy. Click the link below to learn more about Zoho Desk.

One of the best things about Plex is the “Doom” appeal. Whatever the device is, be it a Samsung Tizen TV, PlayStation5, VR headset, or even a Facebook portal, there’s a first party app that will let you stream your own DVD and Blue-ray rips to it. Need more Shrek on your Android Auto dashboard

While you’ll barrel down the highway? Well, they’ve got an app for that too- No, sorry, I’m just kidding about that one. There is a Plex app for the car, but it’s audio only. That’s a key benefit of being a for-profit company as opposed to an open source project.

You have the money to pay people to handle not just porting your applications over and testing them, but also to deal with the tedium of getting them certified and listed on the various app stores. I can’t speak for our international audience, but in Canada, there are a total

Of 11 streaming apps available on the PS5 that aren’t specifically for sports, and Plex is the only one of them that’s for self-hosted media. And while Jellyfin does also have an impressive lineup of official apps, especially when they’re free and open source nature’s accounted for,

Many of them are simply wrappers for web browsers that access the standard Jellyfin Web UI. It is fine for most scenarios, but as we’ll discuss later, confining developers to the limitations of a browser does have some downsides. Just try using Jellyfin on the Xbox and it will become painfully clear

That this method doesn’t work well for every use case. The Jellyfin team does seem to be moving to address this issue though. On iOS, there are currently two official apps available, Jellyfin Mobile, which is the standard web browser implementation and the newly released Swiftfin,

A proper native app that aims to be a standalone solution instead of piggybacking on top of Safari. For now, all that one can do is basic library browsing and playback which barely scratches the surface of Jellyfin’s capabilities, but unlike its web browser cousin,

It finally works on Apple TV and could help to expand Jellyfin’s feature set in the future. Of course, none of these apps matter if we don’t have a server to get the content from in the first place. Thankfully, neither Plex nor Jellyfin are difficult to set up.

On a Windows desktop, it’s as easy as running an app and following the basic instructions. All you really need is familiarity with File Explorer so that you can point the server app at the correct folder or folders. On Docker, it is a touch trickier, but it’s not any more challenging

Than setting up any other Docker image. The one curve ball is you do need to choose between the Linux server image and the official image. Both are acceptable, but the Linux server group just likes to change configurations a little bit compared to stock. Once the base installation is concluded,

The finer details of set up are all done through the web browser of any machine on the same network as the server. The only scenario where there seems to be a big difference in server install methods is with FreeBSD. Plex supports it, Jellyfin does not, and TrueNAS CORE is based on FreeBSD,

So it’s a bit of a bummer for users of what is arguably the best free NAS software. Setting up the library was as close to seamless as possible on either platform with only minor hiccups for a few titles. On Plex, for example, our Shrek Blue-ray rips were not detected properly.

On Jellyfin though, “Thor:Ragnarok” was not detected properly. It was slightly easier though to apply metadata on Plex as it gave us recommendations for what this unrecognized title could be. While on Jellyfin, we needed to use MovieDB in order to set it. Subtitles were downloaded auto-magically by both though,

Which is a huge plus for accessibility. DVD special features and extras, on the other hand, were not handled automatically on either system. Both times, the files needed to be put in a specially named folder and have their metadata entered manually. This would be a great area for both of them

To improve though we’re not quite sure if there’s a good resource that already exists for cataloging the home release extras, especially given how many of them there are and how different regions, and even different releases of the same movie in the same region, will often have different content. Speaking of content,

Filtering on Jellyfin works pretty well. On web and Android, the UI is easy to follow with enough options to find most of what you want and all of them seem to just work. Multiple options can be selected, both from different filters and from the same section. On Google TV and Swiftfin,

That’s unfortunately not the case. You have some sorting options but it’s not really a replacement. Plex content filtering, on the other hand, is much more robust, but it lacks the ability to mix and match options usually. On Android, you can mix and match away but don’t try it on your TV.

In order to get to the filtering on either though, you will first have to go into the section for the type of media you want, then into the Library tab from the default Recommended tab. Jellyfin’s default view by contrast just feels less demanding. The first thing you see is a row

Of your different library types followed by a row of media you can continue to watch and then finally, a list of the latest editions to your libraries. No matter what you want, you’re clicking in roughly the same area and it doesn’t require you to use multiple menus and click all around (mouse clicks)

Your screen just to filter through shows or movies. Parental controls in Jellyfin are likewise pretty complete. Libraries can be restricted by account and maximum parental ratings can be set. Since we’re in Canada, the Canadian Motion picture ratings are used, but even when media has a rating from another system,

It seems to translate over pretty well. A PG-13 rating, for example, will be read the same as a 14-A rating. Plex has a cool feature called Managed Accounts, which allows you to set maximum ratings by selecting one of four restriction profiles, Younger Kid, Older Kid, Teen, And None.

You’re not able to customize however what these profiles restrict or create new ones, which seems like kind of an oversight to me. If you create a managed account, you can actually share that with your friends and family but they won’t have very much autonomy over it. You can share your entire Plex library

With their separate account that they control though, turning your Blue-ray collection into a sort of legally problematic private Netflix. In order to use all the features though, they will need a Plex Pass of their own. Jellyfin’s only option for accounts is to create one manually for each person, not unlike a Plex managed account, which isn’t a problem, but they won’t be able to select their own username

Or recover their account if they lose their password. So if you enjoy resetting Great Aunt Janine’s six letter password every three weeks so she can watch her stories, you’ll have a great time with that. How about the actual video players though? As it turns out, these vary a fair bit between platforms.

On Web, Plex allows you to do quite a bit like changing the subtitle styles, accessing the play queue, adding a video to a playlist, downloading the file, and granting library access to others. The only things Jellyfin does that Plex doesn’t do out of the box is show you what time it will be

When the video ends. That’s kind of cool. While they can both skip intros, they both use the same flawed method of detecting intros. Audio gets compared between episodes and sections that match are flagged as long as they adhere to a rule set. As a solution, it’s far from perfect, especially for shows with opening gags and variations,

Such as how Lisa’s saxophone riff changes slightly between episodes. A better solution might be to allow a mixture of this and scene recognition with the ability to tweak it between shows. Plex does not detect intros, for example, that are less than 20 seconds long,

And can only find them in the first half of an episode. Jellyfin’s intro skip, on the other hand, is a plugin that needs to be installed which isn’t convenient, but the payoff is that it is much more customizable. That customization comes at a cost though,

As the only way way to implement the skip intro button is with the web UI. For those browser wrapper apps like the Jellyfin player on iOS, that works fine. But for the native apps like Swiftfin on iOS and Apple TV, there is no way to pop up that skip intro button.

On Google TV, both UIs are similar to pretty much any other video streaming app. Plex lets you toggle subtitles, playlists, and playback quality, the usual. Oh, and it also has an added bonus. Sometimes, when you switch playback quality on a TV show just after the credits finish,

It’ll act like the episode has completed, kicking you to the Up Next screen and then it’ll autoplay the next episode at original quality, which is … This, this is intended functionality, right? Man, I’ve seen a lot of bugs on Plex. Jellyfin on Google TV, while looking similar enough, actually has a surprising amount

Of options for customization. You can change the entire layout of the home screen, the functionality of buttons on your remote, and because it’s a native app, you can even change what underlying video player is being used. Though again, this means that plugins that rely on modifying the web version like skip intro

Simply will not work. On standard phone and tablet Android, we see the biggest difference so far between the UIs. Functionally, they’re not that different from their Google TV counterparts, aside from one key detail, the ability to download. One of Plex biggest selling features is offline mobile access.

They know it and you will too if you try to use a free account. Gotta love that upsell. The idea, and this came along long before YouTube and Netflix offered similar functionality, is that you can download your videos at whatever resolution and bit rate you like and then watch them on the plane

Or wherever else you happen to be. Then when you come back online, any episodes or movies that you watched will be marked as such in your library. Man, that would be a cool feature to have, wouldn’t it? – Yeah! – Of course it would be.

Which is why I get so angry about this. Plex’s mobile downloads feature is buggy at best, and non-functional to the point of false advertising at worst. On Android, downloads might work fine for you, mostly, (horn toots) so long as you want the original quality,

But half a gig or more per 20 minute episode is going to eat up your storage very quickly if you’re working with web downloads and just two full fat Blu-rays could completely fill up an entry level phone, (alarm rings) but then that’s the whole point of having a server

To transcode the files in the first place, right? Unfortunately, downloading transcoded videos is where the trouble really happens. The fact that the download fails is enough to get frustrated over, like, no, you retry this, you know it failed, you know it has to be retried,

Why do you need me to come back to my phone constantly and click the button? But it’s even worse than that. Plex will sometimes show that a download has completed even though it never downloaded anything. Now, this problem can be made worse by not using hardware transcoding,

But it can be very challenging to figure out if hardware transcoding is working, or even if it is working, which GPU it’s running on. I mean, imagine taking a long road trip with a backseat full of kids. You’ve spent valuable packing time in the evening before loading up all the entertainment,

Trusting Plex when it tells you, hey I got you. Half an hour into the drive, all hell breaks loose (man screams) and it’s become painfully clear you’ve been lied to. It’s enough to make you wish you had a vehicle with a separate backseat bubble dome complete with optional restraints and muzzles

To contain your quarreling children – [Homer] D’oh! Which is a reference they might get if the shows I tried to download for them had worked. On iOS, things aren’t much better. Often the app will just crash for me when I’m trying to download and even when it doesn’t,

It might just not work anyway. If you’re using a firewall with DNS rebinding or NAT reflection, there’s a very good chance that the security certificate that Plex attaches will get the transfer blocked and this has been a known issue ever since Plex switched their mobile sync feature

For mobile downloads back in mid 2021. You heard me right? Plex has had more than a full year to fix a major selling feature that they advertise and still haven’t done so, but thank God I have games. And it’s not the first time that they’ve pulled this. Mobile photo backup to your server

Was an awesome alternative to paid cloud services that just quietly went away. Fine, I got over that one, but downloading my media for offline viewing is a make or break feature for me. I care so much about it that when I realized it had stopped working, which was on a recent trip,

I didn’t really travel for a couple years and didn’t really notice, I dropped Plex as a sponsor. We’re not gonna work with Plex until they resolve some of my longtime issues with it. However, it’s also the same reason that I am not going to be switching over to Jellyfin yet.

For now, Jellyfin only offers bog standard download the original file offline viewing, and has no way of keeping track of what has or hasn’t been viewed this way. Thankfully though, the roadmap going forward looks very promising, at least on paper. The move to native apps means that offline playback

Is a very real thing that’s coming up because it doesn’t require downloading a webpage for the UI and it can use the systems built-in video player. Unofficial apps like Findroid already allow you to watch shows offline and can even update episodes once they’re viewed. Unfortunately, it lacks the option to download

A transcoded version, meaning that it’s pretty rough on your storage, but it is an implementation nonetheless, and that means that the Jellyfin core team has something to iterate on. Offline viewing is the top post on Jellyfin’s feature request board and they have said they’re working on it

Even if there is no ETA yet. Similarly, native intro skipping is the fourth most requested feature, though for that one, there’s no word on whether anyone is actively working on it. Given that there’s already open source implementations for these features in some capacity, hopefully they can use the work that’s already been done

To cut down on development time, but being free and open source, slow development cycles are to be expected and we should just be grateful for everything that they do do. Jellyfin’s biggest contributors still have day jobs after all, making it all the more impressive then when they leapfrog Plex in functionality,

Like their configurable HDR tone mapping. I mean it’s frustrating that the paid solution is so buggy and incomplete, and that the free solution is so slow in development. I mean, if we could just put Plex’s money into Jellyfin, maybe we’d have a good solution but then, because capitalism ruins everything,

We’d probably start the cycle all over again. Probably. (horn toots) That leads us pretty well then into the elephant in the room. Emby is the formerly open source project that Jellyfin is based on and apparently already has several of the features that Plex claims to have

And that Jellyfin claims to be working on. Its user base though is significantly smaller to the point where I’m kind of hesitant to put the time into switching over and it also doesn’t help that there’s no effective way to try it before you buy it. But given that there’s seemingly

No other matured alternatives, could it be worth giving a shot? I would love to know your experiences, positive or negative with Emby. Sell me on it, or talk me out of it. As for my final message to the Plex team, guys, you haven’t lost me yet,

But you have got to get it together. Basic functionality, here like this crappy copy of Hercules that I have that won’t play back audio at original quality, but will if I transcode, Like, which by the way, when I transcode, half the time, it reduces the audio volume and not to mention your inability to play the next episode for me on mobile? Stuff like that cannot be broken, but if you can deal with my list here, I will happily take you back as a sponsor.

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This video, you might like our Plex server guide. Even if you’re using something like Jellyfin, it’s actually still quite relevant.